[Discuss] Sync Revisited

[Richard Pieri]

At this point in time I've mostly given up on automated sync systems.
Too many little problems for me to deal with.

I dropped Dropbox a while back because, quite frankly, there's about
zero security to it. Anything based on third-party cloud storage is
automatically on my non-starter list these days, especially after the
Code Spaces breach.

I like the idea of BitTorrent Sync, how it goes about synchronizing
arbitrary directories. The startup times and memory footprint, however,
make it a poor tool for large-scale synchronization. By "large" I mean
half-TB worth of data and hundreds of thousands of files on up.

I gave Syncthing a try now that it's moved beyond the "don't use this in
production" phase. I won't use it for real. It synchronizes nodes, not
directories, and continuously spews error messages when any node in the
group doesn't synchronize all directories under Syncthing control. The
developer (one guy) says that's how it's supposed to work. I say that it
a flawed design because I don't want to sync 600GB of data to my 16GB
tablet. The developer says that he isn't changing Syncthing's behavior
so I say that I'm not using Syncthing.

As of this week I'm back to Unison and some little wrapper scripts.
Nothing -- still -- does sync as well, as fast, and as securely as Unison.

-- 
Rich P.